Tethalaki said:
Well, Dark Force is the first game in the series, Dark Forces 2 is the second, Mysteries of the Sith is the third, Jedi Outcast is the fourth and then Jedi Academy is the fifth.
I personally started with Jedi Academy and went backwards to Jedi Outcast (both of these are very good games, in my opinion). I haven't played the other older games.
Note that if you do play them in the correct order, the first three games -are- old*, so if you can't stand old games/graphics don't play them.
*Mysteries of the Sith was '98, Jedi Outcast was 2002.
Mysteries of the Sith was actually an expansion pack to
Jedi Knight, not a standalone game. You should go ahead and at least play
Jedi Knight and
Mysteries of the Sith, as they hold up as good games even today. There's even a mod for
Jedi Knight that upgrades the models and textures to the standard of
Jedi Outcast and
Jedi Academy, although the modding community couldn't upgrade the Sith engine itself to the standard of the Idtech III engine, so the lighting and so on don't look as nice as the later games.
Dark Forces would hold up today too, but it was one of the first games to ever use looking up and down, and it doesn't support mouselook, so the controls are really clunky by today's standards. If Lucius ever finishes <link=http://www.darkxl.df-21.net>DarkXL, that will be fixed, but he's been in Alpha for a couple of years now.
OT: I haven't actually played anything past the original Jedi Knight, so I can't say what's the best out of the series. With the ones I have played, I'd say the games themselves are of equivalent quality to one another, but
Jedi Knight is much easier to get into for modern gamers, because it actually supports mouselook.
Dark Forces made you use the pgup and pgdn keys on the keyboard instead, and I can't imagine someone who didn't play it when it was new putting up with that today. Heck, I grew up with the game, and the controls are the main reason I don't have it installed right now.